The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie / Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie
2021, 1996, c1996., 2021-07-13, 19960101
eBook
With this book the editors complete the three-volume series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism that began with The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton, 1983) and The Japanese ...Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton, 1989). The Japanese military takeover in Manchuria between 1931 and 1932 was a critical turning point in East Asian history. It marked the first surge of Japanese aggression beyond the boundaries of its older colonial empire and set Japan on a collision course with China and Western colonial powers from 1937 through 1945. These essays seek to illuminate some of the more significant processes and institutions during the period when the empire was at war: the creation of a Japanese-dominated East Asian economic bloc centered in northeast Asia, the mobilization of human and physical resources in the older established areas of Japanese colonial rule, and the penetration and occupation of Southeast Asia.Introduced by Peter Duus, the volume contains four sections: Japan's Wartime Empire and the Formal Colonies (Carter J. Eckert and Wan-yao Chou), Japan's Wartime Empire and Northeast Asia (Louise Young, Y. Tak Matsusaka, Ramon H. Myers, and Takafusa Nakamura), Japan's Wartime Empire and Southeast Asia (Mark R. Peattie, E. Bruce Reynolds, and Ken'ichi Goto), and Japan's Wartime Empire in Other Perspectives (George Hicks, Hideo Kobayashi, and L. H. Gann).
During the spring of 1938, a flood of Chinese refugees displaced by the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) converged on the central Yangzi valley tricity complex of Wuhan. For ten remarkable months, in a ...highly charged atmosphere of carnage, heroism, and desperation, Wuhan held out against the Japanese in what would become a turning point in the war—and one that attracted international attention. Stephen MacKinnon for the first time tells the full story of Wuhan's defense and fall, and how the siege's aftermath led to new directions in the history of modern Chinese culture, society, and politics.
In this probing and original study, Parks M. Coble examines the devastating impact of Japan's invasion and occupation of the lower Yangzi on China's emerging modern business community. Arguing that ...the war gravely weakened Chinese capitalists, Coble demonstrates that in occupied areas the activities of businessmen were closer to collaboration than to heroic resistance. He shows how the war left an important imprint on the structure and culture of Chinese business enterprise by encouraging those traits that had allowed it to survive in uncertain and dangerous times. Although historical memory emphasizes the entrepreneurs who followed the Nationalists armies to the interior, most Chinese businessmen remained in the lower Yangzi area. If they wished to retain any ownership of their enterprises, they were forced to collaborate with the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. Characteristics of business in the decades prior to the war, including a preference for family firms and reluctance to become public corporations, distrust of government, opaqueness of business practices, and reliance of personal connections(guanxi)were critical to the survival of enterprises during the war and were reinforced by the war experience. Through consideration of the broader implications of the many responses to this complex era,Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Ordermakes a substantial contribution to larger discussions of the dynamics of World War II and of Chinese business culture.
This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China's War of Resistance against Japan during ...World War II. By presenting women's remembrances of the war, this study examines the interplay between oral history and traditional historical narrative, public discourse and private memories. The women interviewed came from differing social, economic, and educational backgrounds and experienced the war in a variety of ways, some of them active in the communist resistance and others trying to support families or pursue educations in the face of wartime upheaval. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. The accounts of how women coped, worked, and lived during the war years in the Chongqing region recast historical understanding of the roles played by ordinary people in wartime and give women a public voice and face that, until now, have been missing from scholarship on the war.
This book examines the development of wartime culture in the Chinese city of Guilin during the Japanese invasion between 1938 and 1944. Controlled by a nationally powerful Guangxi warlord group, ...Guilin's liberal atmosphere attracted intellectuals who engaged in various forms of literary production, making the city a new wartime cultural center.
No nation is free from the charge that it has a less-than-complete view of the past. History is not simply about recording past events—it is often contested, negotiated, and reshaped over time. ...Debate over the history of World War II in Asia remains surprisingly intense, and Divergent Memories examines the opinions of powerful individuals to pinpoint the sources of conflict: from Japanese colonialism in Korea and atrocities in China to the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japan. Rather than labeling others' views as "distorted" or ignoring dissenting voices to create a monolithic historical account, Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider pursue a more fruitful approach: analyzing how historical memory has developed, been formulated, and even been challenged in each country. By identifying key factors responsible for these differences, Divergent Memories provides the tools for readers to both approach their own national histories with reflection and to be more understanding of others.
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A
Spectator Book of the Year "Insightful…a deft,
textured work of intellectual history." - Foreign Affairs
"A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the ...second
world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about
the past and the present in contemporary China." -Peter Frankopan,
The Spectator For most of its history, China frowned on
public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has
grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years
has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism
at home. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese
scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and
to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China's role in
the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows,
magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for
an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One
narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the
international order-a virtuous system that many in China now
believe to be under threat from the United States. China's radical
reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation
that sees itself as destined to shape the world. "A detailed and
fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership's strategy has
evolved across eras…At its most interesting when probing Beijing's
motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past."
- Wall Street Journal "The range of evidence that Mitter
marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory,
and the international order is…original." - The
Economist
The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections ...and causes. The Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbour and Western interests throughout the Pacific in 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century.
Chinese Comfort Women Qiu, Peipei; Zhiliang, Su; Lifei, Chen
2014, 2013, 2014-05-01
eBook
Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns.
Covering the years of Japanese invasion during World War II from
1937 to 1945, this essay collection recounts Chinese experiences of
living and working under conditions of war. Each of the regimes
...that ruled a divided China-occupation governments, Chinese
Nationalists, and Chinese Communists-demanded and glorified the
full commitment of the people and their resources in the
prosecution of war. Through stories of both everyday people and
mid-level technocrats charged with carrying out the war, this book
brings to light the enormous gap between the leadership's demands
and the reality of everyday life. Eight long years of war exposed
the unrealistic nature of elite demands for unreserved commitment.
As the political leaders faced numerous obstacles in material
mobilization and retreated to rhetoric of spiritual resistance, the
Chinese populace resorted to localized strategies ranging from
stoic adaptation to cynical profiteering, articulated variously
with touches of humor and tragedy. These localized strategies are
examined through stories of people at varying classes and levels of
involvement in living, working, and trying to work through the war
under the different regimes. In less than a decade, millions of
Chinese were subjects of disciplinary regimes that dictated the
celebration of holidays, the films available for viewing, the
stories told in tea houses, and the restrictions governing the
daily operations and participants of businesses-thus impacting the
people of China for years to come. This volume looks at the
narratives of those affected by the war and regimes to understand
perspectives of both sides of the war and its total outcomes.
Living and Working in Wartime China depicts the brutal
micromanaging of ordinary lives, devoid of compelling national
purposes, that both undercut the regimes' relationships with their
people and helped establish the managerial infrastructure of
authoritarian regimes in subsequent postwar years.
